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Artist
Cédric Vuille
12+ albums
chamber-progmulti instrumentalistRIO Relatedavan popswitzerland
about
biography[-]by Dave Lynch For over 30 years, Swiss multi-instrumentalist Cédric Vuille has recorded some of the most accessible, engaging, and tuneful music ever to fall under the "avant-garde" rubric. His introduction to an international -- although cultishly small -- listening audience came in the early '80s when he appeared on the debut album by the Rock in Opposition-informed band Débile Menthol; after that group called it a day, Vuille and another Débile Menthol member, Jean-20 Huguenin, formed the amiable but adventurous L'Ensemble Rayé, who would record and perform intermittently into the 21st century. In the mid-2000s, however, Vuille stepped out with his own recording projects, demonstrating his good-natured and far-reaching command of global musical styles and abilities on practically any instrument that could be plucked or strummed -- plus clarinet. And as revealed by the liner notes to his 2007 CD, #804 Center Street, Vuille's stylistic mélange was not just a meld of RIO and "world music" currents: he had spent a mid-'70s high-school year in the U.S. Pacific Northwest as an exchange student, soaking up the influences of such West Coast bands as Hot Tuna, It's a Beautiful Day, and Little Feat. What he later did with those influences, however, was entirely his own. Débile Menthol came along a bit too late for the first wave of the Rock in Opposition, whose charter members (Henry Cow, Univers Zero, Samla Mammas Manna, Stormy Six, and Etron Fou Leloublan) appeared,
